Poems of Gratitude (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Sequence)

For hundreds of years, poets in all cultures have supplied eloquent thanks and reward for the folks and issues of this world. The voices collected right here vary from Sappho, Horace, and Rumi to Shakespeare and Milton, from Wordsworth, Rilke, Yeats, Rossetti, and Dickinson to Czesław Miłosz, Langston Hughes, Yehuda Amichai, Anne Sexton, W. S. Merwin, Maya Angelou, and plenty of extra. Such beloved favorites as Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Magnificence,” Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Keep,” Constantine Cavafy’s “Ithaka,” and Adam Zagajewski’s “Attempt to Reward the Mutilated World,” mingle with classics from China and Japan, and with conventional Navajo, Aztec, Inuit, and Iroquois poems. Devotional lyrics drawn from the main spiritual traditions of the world discover a place right here alongside poetic tributes to autumn and the harvest season that draw consideration to nature’s bounty and poignant magnificence as winter approaches. The result’s a wonderfully assorted literary feast that honors and affirms the enjoyment in our lives whereas acknowledging the sorrows and losses that give that pleasure its keenness.